Here's How I Overcame Imposter Syndrome

How do you stand out amongst all these different businesses, all these different people that are doing the same thing? What a lot of people make the mistake of thinking is, I'm going to just have to do it better. That's how I'm going to beat my competition. But better is so subjective. You don't stand out by being better. You stand out by being different. Whenever you try and be better, you put an impossible standard out there. My thought is that instead of trying to be better, just be who you are and recognize that it will be different and embrace that difference. When you embrace what makes you different, you now have a certainty and a place of power. You're being true to yourself, where you are, how you are right now. All right, so this is the presentation. How to be a winning risk taker who leverages asymmetric upside to your favor. Which is what Laura asked me to, which was a strange thing for her to ask me to do, because I thought about it, and even when I told friends that I was going to do it, like, I don't really see myself as some big risk taker. In fact, I can't really think of many risks that I've taken. But I think it's the way I look at things that kind of make. Makes it different. And I've never presented on anything even somewhat closely related to this. So I've put a lot of thought into it, actually. I started mapping out, and I'm going to do my very best to try and convey what was very clear on that board to me, to you. And I can't promise that it's going to be as smooth in my head as I would like it to be, but there we go. All right, so when we think about risk in general, what first comes to mind? Fear. Okay. There are many negative things that can come to mind when we think of risk, right? Losing fear, embarrassment, et cetera. But as many positive things as well. Discovery, opportunity, et cetera. So risk really is relative to what we're talking about. It could be negative, it could be positive. And many times in my own life, as we'll get to the risk has been a positive influence in my life. But this is the general formula for risk. The probability of an occurrence, positive, negative, the severity of it. Those are the two elements, and that equals risk. So it's probability times whatever, probability of the thing happening, whatever that thing is. But my promise here in this presentation, what I want to try and get you to see is that the way you look at yourself and who you are and what your Life goals are. That has more of an impact on your tolerance for risk than anything else. And I want you to see your relationship to one who you are. My hope is that you actually make it a little bit less firm, your commitment to who you currently are. And if I can do that, I think the risk will take care of itself. So this is my belief. I believe this quote to be true, that the mass of people lead lives of quiet desperation. I saw this when I was doing research, and I just thought that intro paragraph really sums it up. Most people live an empty life caused by unfulfilling work, lack of leisure time, misplaced values, money, possessions, and accolades. Thoreau claimed that the value we attach to possessions, money and status is wrong. Quiet, desperate lives are routine and emotionless. And I think most people spend a lot of time there. I think most people spend a lot of time sleepwalking through life just on autopilot, kind of the drift, just going with the flow, not really separating themselves out. And it's a surrender now. I'll get to it a little bit later. I went through a midlife crisis about eight years ago or 10 years ago now and did every kind of transformational program. And one thing that really stuck with me was something that they went over in Landmark. So if you ever took Landmark, this might look familiar because it's theirs, it's not mine. But it resonated with me. And what the person who was teaching put this up on the board and was talking about resignation and saying how there was a time when you might have thought that you could change the world at the very top. And then as you got older and life beat you up a little bit and experiences happened, maybe you didn't think about changing the world anymore. You thought maybe about changing society or your business or your community or then your family. And now you're not even sure you can change the person you're in relationship with. Or maybe you can't even change yourself. And that's what resignation is, resignation is. My experience with it is that your goals just get smaller over time. Maybe not even consciously, but just unconsciously. The dreams that you had when you were younger to the dreams that you have now, just different and not bigger and better, often smaller. So whenever I do any kind of event consulting, whatever, I always ask people, why are you here? Why? What do you want from me? With events especially, why are you here? Because I find that people come to events sometimes not even clear what they're looking for, hoping that the person on stage somehow has some magical ability to Know what it is that you need, even though you don't know what you need. And then to be able to articulate it so that you get what it is that you need, even though you don't know what it is that you need. So if you don't know why you're here, that's a symptom of something bigger, right? If you're not clear what you're looking for specific or what do you want? I am shocked at how many people have a hard time answering that question. What do you want? What do you want out of life? What do you want? And if you can't answer that, hey, Jack. If you can't answer that, then that's also a symptom. It's a symptom of being disconnected to who you really are. And probably most important, what's your definition of success? Each and every one of us should have our own unique definition of what success means to us. My girlfriend Kim, before she retired, she was in private equity and she managed people's assets who were billionaires. And so I've gotten a chance to meet a lot of them and I wouldn't trade my life with theirs. And I'm not a billionaire, not even close. But my day to day life I like more than their lives. So my definition of success is obviously different than theirs, right? And each of us needs that definition because risk is very much related to that. Risk is what might interfere with that. So if your definition of Success is a $20 million house on the ocean and whatever else, and then there's something that you could do that might help you get there or not get there, there's risk involved, right? You might not get that house on the ocean. But if your definition of personal success is to have a life full of experiences, what would be risky for someone who's trying to get a $20 million mansion wouldn't be risky for you. So understanding what really how you define personal success is critically important. And even outside of the scope of personal, even in business, it's critical to know the game that you're playing and why you're playing it. So I said that these are symptoms. If you don't know these things and what they're symptoms of is that you think that who you are is actually how you wound up being. And this is a heady concept and I don't know how well I can communicate it in a short time, but I'm going to give you different experiences or different examples from my own life that I hope will illustrate it. There's a difference between who you are and how you wound up being. How you wound up being is how just the events have happened that have led to this moment right now. And it's how you are in this moment. It's wound up being. Right. But who you really are is so much bigger than that, so much better than that that I want to make clearer as we go. I assume that it's not extremely clear right now this difference. When I did a transformation workshop at my office, I did three of them the first whole day. People would do a lot of work, and then they would come to the conclusion at the end of the day that everything that they had laid out for themselves was really just a function of how they wound up being, and it wasn't who they really are. So I love this quote by Helen Keller. Life is either a daring adventure or nothing. Security does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Right? Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than exposure. And there's this idea, right? Risk is very much related to this. A daring adventure is risky. All right, so let me give you some stories from my past to help illustrate some of this and then tie a bunch of things together. All right? So a lot of people don't know this about me, but I went to yeshiva as a child. So the skull cap, the thing on my head to fill in tzitzit underneath my shirt, that was me, right? Is that me, or is that how I wound up being? That's how I wound up being at a young age. But was it really me? No, probably not. I then transferred to public school, and it was just unfortunate timing because I transferred in in junior high. And the junior high was three separate big elementary schools going into that junior high. So everybody was new, but everybody knew a third of the people except for me. So I was the new kid. There were new kids later on in high school, but everyone knew that person was new. I was new, and no one knew. And I wasn't really that socially adept. So I ended up sitting alone in the cafeteria. Just wasn't a pleasant experience. I was a loner. And to make matters worse, like, as far as my upbringing in childhood, and this isn't a pity party or anything like that, this is awkward to talk about, but it's part of the story. So got to. My dad's a sociopath and my mom's a narcissist. To give you a perspective on that. What is that? Tell you a story about my dad. So my dad taught Me lots of wonderful things in my life. He also screwed me royally. But When I was 12 or 13, we were in his car and he was smoking a cigar as he always did with the windows closed. A cigar with the windows closed. And I asked him, dad, why do you not open the windows? And so the first thing he told me was, we pulled over and he said, rich, you should always keep your secret. If anyone knows your secrets, they'll have power over you. It's a weird thing for a father to tell a 12 year old son. But regardless, the next he tells me a secret. I smoke cigars in the car so that I smell like a cigar when I get out so that your mom doesn't smell anything on me. This lighter, it's a solid gold lighter. This lighter is a lighter that my mistress bought me. That was when I was 12. So crazy childhood, very strange and just made my home life somewhat not pleasant. So I rebelled and what I did is I started going to off track betting. That's a place in New York City, New York, and you can bet on horse races. So instead of going to school, I spent my time at the track. And at the track I got very lucky. I actually won quite a bit at this otb and after going there for a period of time, made friends with some of the degenerate gamblers there. And one of them told me I shouldn't really be betting with otb, I should really be betting with a bookie because OTB takes 5% off the top and I could get 5% more on my bets if I bet with the booking. So that's what I started doing. I started betting with the bookie who was hanging out in the OTB taking bets. And one time I won a lot from him and he didn't have enough money to pay me. He was six' six and he told me that if I came back the next day, he'd give me the money and I had no choice. So I went back the next day and he had the money for me and his name was Dominic. And him. And I hit it off because my dad was who my dad was. A common theme in my entire life has always been looking for father figures. So Jay Abraham is a father figure of mine. But earlier in my life, like I was looking to older men all the time to give me the life experience to teach me stuff that my dad wouldn't. So anyway, so Dominic took me under his wing. But since I wasn't going to school and therefore I was failing and not doing well, I Was also in trouble with my parents all the time. My parents didn't know how to deal with that. So the best way that they knew how to deal with it was to lock me in a room. So I was locked in a room. I spent much of my time going to school, coming home, getting locked in a room. I went to the bathroom in the room, like in a bucket. It was unpleasant until I left. So I ran away. I ran away from home. I had been making money on the track, so ran into the city, and Dominic happens to be in the Colombo crime family. And when I ran away from home, I ran into Dominic. And Dominic allowed me to follow him around, be his little gopher for a few weeks. Now, Dominic was fixing horse races, him and a bunch of guys. And what they were doing was they were having in eight horse races, they were paying off three jockeys not to come in first, second or third. So the people that were coming in first, second and third had no idea that they were going to be coming in first, second and third. But the people who they knew wouldn't be, they could eliminate so that they could bet all the combinations for first, second and third, minus those three. So it was an easy way to stack the odds in your favor. And that's something else about risk, right? That when you can limit your downside, you can be a lot more aggressive, right? You can take more risk when you're able to limit your downside. And the movie Goodfellas was based on a book called Wise Guy. And while Dominic's not in the movie, he's in the book. And I've told Kim countless stories from the mob days when I was a kid running little gopher things. I gained a tremendous amount of weight, as when I was with those guys, because I would go to the track with them, and then my job was to get them. Hey, Richie, get me a slice of pizza. Hey, Richie, get me lobster. Hey, Richie, get me. And get yourself something. And I got myself something every single time. So I gained a lot of weight. But even in what I've covered so far, right, Like I was a shiva kid, that was one way I wound up being. I was a loner. That was another way I wound up being. Right. I don't even know what you call this, a street kid or something. Another way that I wound up being two different horse races in the winning circle. Then one night at Yonkers Raceway, Dominic and his crew cleaned out the track. They always told me what to bet on, and I bet last, but they cleaned out the track by the time I got to cash my tick, the track did not have any more hundreds or fifties. They only had twenties. I was fourteen and I won $15,000. And I had it all in twenties, which looks like that. And I never had that much money. And I got home at 1 o' clock in the morning. I didn't have a curfew, and I was just counting it on my desk like they weren't as clean as those. I was trying to make them all nice and crisp. And guess who walked into my room at 2 o' clock in the morning when I was playing with all this money, but my dad. So he came, what the fuck? He grabbed that money, he took it off my desk. He told me to go into his home office. We had a conversation about it. I told him everything that was going on. He ended up hanging out with those guys. I wasn't allowed to hang out with those guys anymore. That bought me my first car two years later. But I've told Kim a lot of these stories. And that's Michael Francis. I don't know how many people know who he is, but he's the largest grossing mobster of all time. He did a racket with gas tax and didn't pay gas tax in the tune of billions of dollars from the government. But anyway, what was really funny was, is that we flew out to California. I interviewed him, and Kim was with me and Kim when Michael and I were talking about people from my past. He knew those guys. And then we were talking about it. And so all of a sudden all the stories that she wasn't really sure were true, all of a sudden she said, holy shit, he really did do this. All right. So anyway, but back in school, I was failing, so that was another way I wound up being juvenile delinquent. Not very good in school. My parents told me this. That's supposed to be me. But obviously that was before the operation. But my parents told me that when I turn 18, I don't have to go to college, but I have to get the fuck out of the house. This is not my home anymore after I'm 18. So I better figure out in the next two years what I'm going to be doing with my life. Because the trajectory I was on was certainly not college, of course, being a rebellious kind of person. Of course. That's all I needed to hear then to totally turn around my life. Just the fact that they had given up on me and that we want you out of here in the next two years was like, oh, okay, now I'LL do well. So I totally reinvented myself. Another change of who I was. So I ended up becoming a straight A student, class treasurer, and I even decided to get an after school job. So I got an after school job. The after school job I got was at a place called Investor Center. And if that sounds familiar at all, that's because if you watched Wolf of Wall street, when he goes into this scene, that's Investor Center. So I was there when he actually got hired. That was his first job. There was no guy on Wall street doing this. It was his first stock brokerage job. It wasn't in a strip mall, the way they show it there. But I got to watch him actually do the one call close that no one else in the office could do. And he would come in for an hour or two a day, close, like two or three people, and then leave. Now, as a high school student, turning around my life, getting straight A's now, like, I recognized very quickly how sleazy and disgusting this, because penny stocks are. Like, the bid and ask is $0.25, $0.50. So when someone spends $10,000 investing in something, it's immediately only worth $5,000, because that's the difference between the bid and the ask, which means that the broker gets 60% of that commission. So you spend 10,000. 5,000 is total commission. It's the difference between the bid and the ask. And then 3,000 of it goes into the broker's pocket. It's very hard to make money investing when you lose 30% off the top to the broker, 20% to the house. That's worse than Vegas. You could play cards, and it's only a 5% rate, but crazy childhood, right? My life intersected with Goodfellows. It intersected with Wolf of Wall Street. But who I was in each of these places was someone different. So after high school, I had to reinvent myself again. Or I got the opportunity to, because I recognize now that I could actually be whoever I wanted to be. And I went to college where no one from my high school was going to. So that really gave me carte blanche to really think through who did I want to be. I felt like I was getting a total clean slate. And I don't know that most people take a step back and think that way, but I strongly recommend it. Who do you need to be to make your business successful? Who do you need to be to accomplish any goal? So in college, I did really well. Won a lot of scholarships from Arthur Anderson, joined a fraternity called Sigma Chi. I was supposed to work for the FBI. One summer I was chosen as one of 50 students in the country. But then I failed security clearance. Surprise. Based on my childhood. So I spent the summer at Harvard and I worked for Accenture as well and thought I was going to spend the rest of my life working for Arthur Anderson and Accenture. That's another version of me. Rich Sheffrin, the accountant. But in my senior year, my second semester, my dad told me that he was going to to close a store that he had because it was losing money and the lease was running out in six months. So it was a store that was never like his primary business, but it was something that he owned. And I thought I could turn it around, I thought I could make it successful. So I made him a deal. I said, give me the six months to turn that store around and if I get it to break even or better, renew the lease and we'll be partners. You're going to close it anyways. And if I'm able to turn it around, I will compensate you. I'll reimburse you for any losses that happened once I took it over. So we made a deal, I came back and that's what happened, right? So instead of closing, I turned it around. Now the store was in Manhattan, it was on Broadway, one of the most trafficked streets in New York City, between SoHo and NoHo. And every major retailer is there. And I have this shitty store and I have to compete with them. And that's a problem. It's not going to be easy. These are all vertically integrated companies. Like, I can't do better than Urban Outfitters or the Gap or all these companies. And so I really was racking my brain of how could I compete with all these people? What did I have as a 22, 23 year old kid? How could I compete with these huge companies, change the trajectory of this store, right? How could I stand out? How could I make this store memorable and actually be a destination, like something that people would go to? And this is where I first really discovered that being different is a much better aspiration than being better. One of the subtexts of my success consistently is trying to do things differently in a way that is obvious, like noticeably different. So with the store, there was no store that was catering to the club lifestyle, right? This is back in the 90s, raves, clubs, stuff like that. There was no one really catering to that. And I felt that was something that I was into, something that I enjoyed. I enjoyed going to raves and techno music and all that stuff. And doing ecstasy and all kinds of things. And so I decided that I knew that better than certainly anyone from the Gap or Urban Outfitters or any of these other places. And so that's what I made the store. And my goal was that whether you liked the store or hated the store, you would remember walking. You would not like, you might walk into 150 stores that day, but you would remember that one store that was different than all the other stores. We lit it like a club and the clothes fitted as well. Because if you're not different, ultimately you're invisible. And in today's age, right, where everyone. I feel like it's such a good time to be talking about risk, because, one, we are certainly in a very uncertain time, right? Who knows what's happening with the economy, with inflation, with everything. But in addition to that, because of COVID the last two years, more people are online than ever before. So there's more opportunity online than ever before. But there's also more competition than ever before. There's more businesses online than ever before. So now there's more opportunity. But how do you stand out amongst all these different businesses, all these different people that are doing the same thing maybe than what you're doing? And so what a lot of people make the mistake of thinking is, I'm going to just have to do it better. That's how I'm going to beat my competition. But better is so subjective, and better is only found out after the fact, not prior. So you don't stand out by being better, you stand out by being different. But I think that there's something incredibly important that gets missed about this difference between better versus different. So I think whenever you try and be better, you put an impossible standard, or you run the risk of putting an impossible standard out there. Imposter syndrome, that's something that I hear people struggle with. But I think imposter syndrome really comes from having standards that you believe are standards that you need to have in order to be better and then be the choice for other people. But if you recognize that you are different, each and every one of us is different. And if you were just more yourself, you'd be more different. Then the standard is where you are right now. So my thought is that instead of trying to be better, just be who you are and recognize that it will be different and embrace that difference. When you embrace what makes you different, you now have a certainty and a place of power. You're being true to yourself, where you are, how you are right now. I love this quote. I remember reading it in the book by Robert Holden. No amount of self improvement can make up for any lack of self acceptance. So what I see a lot of people do is they think they need to be this in order to have whatever it is that they want as opposed to just recognizing that they could have that based on who they are right now and then they're not good enough and now they're going to work on themselves to be better. But guess what? You never get to a place where you feel good enough. Porter Stansberry I've worked with agora for about 20 years. And when I first met Porter about, I don't know, 17, 18 years ago, Porter was speaking to a group and he was talking about how everyone knows that people buy for emotional reasons. We've heard that, we know that. What he said that I never heard anyone talk about before was that emotional reason never gets satisfied. So you can get someone to keep buying for that same emotional reason. Like I buy a lot of books. I think I buy a lot of books because probably somewhere when I was young, like I was made to feel stupid and now I need to be smart. But there's no book I'm ever going to read that's going to cure that. I'm not going to read that book and be like, oh, done, I'm smart enough, I don't need any more books. And no amount of self improvement ever gets you to the point where you're like, I'm good. But if you achieve success based on your difference, you are good. So there's this. I told you I went to yeshiva. So I remember one thing from one of the classes. And in the Jewish religion, in part of the mystic side, there's something they have this kind of analogy of a problem tree. And on this tree is everyone's problems. And the question is, would you be willing to go to that tree and trade all of your problems for some random person's problems? And if you wouldn't, then what are you complaining about? If you have it so bad, you should easily want to trade all of your horrible problems for the average person. But if you're not willing to, then your problems aren't so bad. I think it's just a great way to have the reality check. People will always talk, so give them something to talk about. It's your uniqueness. Right now I had these great slides of all these different urinals from all these great bathrooms in the world. I have a collection of the strangest urinals, right? Because if I showed you These urinals, you would all remember them and that's what you would be talking about, but the presentation would be too long. But in my marketing, I've always tried to do this as well. Like in every campaign that I ever did, I always tried to have something towards the front of the campaign that gave people a reason to talk about it. Hey, have you heard what Sheffrin did? Have you seen this? So whether it was a 24 hour live stream, whether it was the first time ever doing a live stream, these kinds of things, like just to give people a reason to talk, they're going to talk anyway. Nowadays especially. I wrote this report in 2007 called the Attention Age Doctrine 2. And it was all about the rise of Web 2.0. We're now in the rise of Web 3, but this was in the rise of Web 2. And one of the things I talked about in this report on page 53 was that your prospects aren't targets, they're the best marketing channel that you've got, right? Prospects were no longer just a target. Now they were actually your best media channel. I've been fortunate enough that a few of my reports went pretty viral. And they went viral because my prospects shared them, right? People who never bought from me got me other people consistently and so on. That only happens though, if you give people a reason to talk and it's easy to talk about things that are different. I think the average person, the average life is pretty shitty. So if you don't want to end up average, then you shouldn't do what average people do. So this was just my picture of lemmings, which supposedly they don't really run off cliffs together, but nonetheless, I found that out when I was looking for an image of it and I just decided to use it anyway. But if you're not going to follow the masses and you're not going to just try and be better, then what are you going to do? So I used to talk about this as it related to entrepreneurship quite a bit, that there's really two paths that I see people walk down. Right, the left, you could say, is the illusion of security. And on the right is the reality of uncertainty. So the illusion of security versus the reality of uncertainty. So security is an illusion, but it's a pleasant one. So I started business coaching back in 2003, 2004, first online business coach. And people would come to me and they'd say, if I join your coaching program, how much money am I going to be making in three months from now? And I'M like, I have no idea. I don't even know if you'll be making money in three months from now. Apple doesn't know how much they're going to be making in three months from now. They have a guess. But when someone comes to me and says, how much am I going to be making in three months from now? What they're looking for is that illusion of security, right? And it's a naive question at best, but it's a false belief and there is no security really out there. And if you chase it, more likely than not you will be victim of someone who's making you a promise that can't be kept. So on the other side is the reality of uncertainty, right? The world is uncertain. Everything, especially more today than ever before, but the world is uncertain. So the question then becomes, how do you confidently walk in a world that's uncertain? What can you have confidence in an uncertain world? So I've become recently a big fan of CrossFit. I don't do CrossFit, but I'm a big fan of it. I like to watch it, especially the women, because they are stronger than me, they have more endurance than me and I just love watching it. Anyway, from the 2020 Games, they did something that I think is really cool. It's called the Loop race and that's Mat Fraser on the left and Tia Toomey on the right. Those are the two most winning champions in CrossFit. They had to do a run, right? They didn't tell them what they were going to encounter on that run, nor how long the run is. How do you run a race when you don't know how long it is, when you don't even know what you're going to encounter, whether you're going to have to pick up 100 pound sandbags or not and run them up a steep slope? How do you prepare for something like that? The whole CrossFit games are, you cannot prepare for because you don't know what you're going to be doing. But then in an individual event, while you're doing the event, you don't even know how long it is. And that's what life is, though, in my opinion, that's what life is. You don't know, like when you take on a goal, when you take on a project, you don't know it's going to end at this time. You don't know what uncertainties are going to come up. You don't know what challenges, you don't know whether this person quits right in the middle or whatever, you just commit to the outcome. So these athletes commit to the outcome and they work on their fitness to an insane level so that all they have to be confident is that they can handle it and handle it better than the next person based on the training that they've done. And that is, I think, one of the best metaphors for life. And it's one of the best ways to think about uncertainty. This is like real moment uncertainty, right? You don't even know should you be running at a 10 minute mile pace, a 6 minute mile pace, right? You don't want to end with having a lot in reserve, but you don't want to conk out midway either. So it's tough. So confidence and uncertainty. When you have confidence and uncertainty, you are able to perform at a level that few people can. And we all operate in uncertainty. So being able to thrive in uncertainty is a very powerful place to be. So I thought about three things that I do that allow me to operate pretty confidently in a world of uncertainty. All right? One is understanding the hedonic treadmill. I tell you that I was locked in a room, but the first week I was locked in that room, it sucked. There was nothing in that room except my school books. But after that first week, life was normal. Because that's how life is like. We get used to whatever it is. We always think bad things will be horrible, great things will be wonderful, and in the end, most of the time, a couple weeks out, it's the same. And so recognizing that your ability to handle whatever comes up is really there. Because we all have the hedonic treadmill. So that's first being yourself. If you're comfortable being yourself and you achieve success based on who you are, you have a lot less to be worried about. So that's the second thing, right? The third thing is looking at problems. How do you look at problems? And it's not something cheesy. Look at problems as opportunities, although you should. But when you experience problems, do you see the opportunity in it? So let me give you an example. So back to the store. I took over, turned it around, took it from like a 1.5 million. That's what it was doing. The break even was 3 million when I took it over, turned it around, got it up to seven and a half million. And at that point we were trying to grow the business even more. And it's all about maximizing your sales per square foot in retail. And in order to do that, you have to turn inventory. So we turn the store five times a year, which means we sold out 10% of the store every week. And one day, as I was trying to figure out how do we maximize sales per square foot even more, it occurred to me that I started thinking about, well, maybe we could build the mezzanine and that would give us extra square footage because we had really tall ceilings, 40 foot ceilings. But then I was thinking more and more about it and I was like, what about the air? We could fill the air with stuff that we could sell. So that's what we did. We started licensing music and we got live DJs in the store and they were spinning records and then we sold the CDs. And that worked so well that we then built a recording studio right in the middle of the store and started a record label and had worldwide distribution. And that took the store up a notch. But it was solving a problem. The problem was how do we maximize sales per square foot when we're already doing everything that we can? And then that led to new opportunities. So I became like catering to the club life Craines Wall Street Journal. And just another way I wound up being, if you read this, the founder of New York's Antique Boutique. This was on the front page of the Wall Street Journal's Marketplace section. The founder of the New York Antique Boutique is a 59 year old Harvey Sheffrin, a garment industry veteran who likes to talk about monthly sales and balance sheets. The store's Chief executive is Mr. Sheffrin's 26 year old son who sports black boots and a shaved head and recently showed up for work in a skirt. I've been a lot of different people, but each time I was just being who I needed to be in that moment with no reservation of that wasn't me because that was me. So every problem within every problem is an opportunity. And the reason why is this is something that I love teaching. In marketing, what is most personal, is most general or most universal. There is nothing that you've experienced that other people haven't experienced too. And there are so many stories that I could tell you about that, but I don't have time. So I just take my word for it. Looking at life like that has led me to lots of innovations. We were the first to ever have a drip elearning thing that dripped out content. We were the first to live stream ever from an event. We were the first to create an automated webinar. But all of these things were solving problems for ourselves. So I want to tell you a little bit about my midlife Crisis. I'm probably going to go five minutes over. I apologize, Laura. Okay. So I had a midlife Crisis in around 2012, and the Midlife crisis really happened because I had achieved everything that I had thought I had wanted. And I found myself unhappy. Now, earlier, that wasn't to say I was always happy, but I believed that when I had achieved those things, I would be happy. So therefore, there was no dread. But now I had achieved what I had wanted and I wasn't happy. And that now led me to quite a quagmire, because what am I going to do? This is now, like, I got what I wanted, I thought I wanted, and now I'm not happy. Like, getting more of what I don't want. That doesn't seem like it's going to make me happy. So I really wasn't sure what to do. So a couple of things that I took away from my midlife crisis that I just wanted to share because they made a difference for me. So the first was goals, right? I had these goals. I had achieved these goals, and I wasn't happy. And so I blamed my goals, obviously. So I decided, okay, what's the point of having a goal if when you achieve it, you're not. You're happy when you first achieve it for a week or two, and then it's right back to normal. The hedonic treadmill. So I was like, okay, then it doesn't really make sense to have any goals. And that was stupid. That didn't really work. I had nothing to do and no point and no place to go. That didn't really work for me. But then I started thinking more about it. Like, when did I feel most alive? When did I feel most dead? What is it that I'm really aiming for? And this was actually on my kitchen table in my apartment back on Fifth Avenue, and I was playing around with flashcards, right? Not taking action on what I want now because I may want something different later has been ineffective and debilitating. And whatever else I wrote down there, what I want now, I may not want later, because that's what I was thinking. Like, I'd achieved these goals, but maybe they weren't the right goals. Maybe they were the wrong goals. So what I want now is what I want. It's never selfish to go after what I want. The only selfish thing is to ask others to sacrifice their happiness to go after what I want. Going after what I want now is what I choose. Taking action has me engaged in life. If I went after things what I want as if my life depended on it, I would be who I really am. Transcending that right to live my life fully, I choose to go after what I want in my life as if my life depended on it. Because my life does depend on who I am when I'm going after it, not on actually achieving it or attaining it. So let me explain. So I think that what's the purpose for me? And I'm not suggesting that this is for everybody, but try it on, see if it fits. Like, the only purpose for a goal is to get you excited and moving. It's not about the attainment, because the attainment, after you attain it, nothing changes. So I evaluate my goals based on do they get me excited and get me into action? If they do, that's what they're there for. If they don't, they're not the right goal. Like the idea that I have these goals but I'm not motivated to achieve them, to me is like an oxymoron. Because your goals are supposed to be motivating. If they're not motivating you, they're not the right goals because that's their purpose. See, I used to think it was all about the achievement of the goals until I realized that didn't bring me any long term happiness. So that was the first thing. So I changed my whole relationship. Goals get me out of bed and get me going. And if they do, that's their job. The next is how do you transcend how you wound up? In any given moment, a small team committed to a cause bigger than themselves can achieve absolutely anything. And that's because commitment trumps reason. So Kim has had the pleasure of meeting a lot of uber successful people because of her job. And I've had the luxury of meeting some number of people that are uber successful. And one thing that we've talked about that they all have in common is that they're unreasonable. They're unreasonable. And what I mean by unreasonable is they don't need a reason. Like, how much are you going to charge for this? $100. Well, why a hundred dollars? Because I said it's $100. There's no reason. Right. They don't need a reason other than that's what they think it should be. Commitment trumps reason. So when you commit to a cause bigger than yourself, right. What that empowers you to do is overlook your own petty grievances, concerns, issues. Right? Like I'm certain Martin Luther King woke up certain days with a headache, but the headache didn't stop him from doing what needed to get done because he was committed to a bigger cause than his own personal happiness. So committing to a cause gives you greater power. It allows you to transcend how you wound up being and actually be better. The reasonable man adapts himself to the world. The unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on unreasonable men. Most entrepreneurs make the mistake of designing their business around some mythical entrepreneur as opposed to who they really are. They think I'm going to be better and so I'm going to be this great entrepreneur running this business as opposed to no, this is who I am. The business I design has to work around the flawed individual that I am. When I used to coach people in business, we spent a lot of time on this. Design your business on who you are. If you're a procrastinator, then you have to design your business so that your business can be successful with the person in charge being a procrastinator. Right? That's what has to happen. If you're not that money motivated, then somehow the business needs to be money motivated without you changing and all of a sudden being money motivated. And you can design these things into a business so that your flaws, your challenges become irrelevant. I'm a highly flawed individual and I've always designed my businesses to try and make my flaws irrelevant. Now you might be thinking about what might I want to commit to. What is that bigger cause? And I can tell you that what I have found, and I wouldn't say it's all the time, but what I've seen, very common, is that if you can mine a powerful purpose from the traumas of your childhood and that can be extremely powerful for an entrepreneur. So I got locked in a room, I had no ability to self express. I didn't have very many friends, I was alone, no freedom, no self expression. That's what I did not have. That's what I was missing as a kid. I help entrepreneurs. The reason I help entrepreneurs succeed is because I think entrepreneurs have the most freedom and have the most freedom to fully self express of anyone on the planet. So what I see myself doing on a daily basis is that I help people have what I was robbed as a child. And there's nothing more powerful than that because I know what it is. I still have that pain of what it felt like. And so you can take the challenges that you've had in your past, see if they relate to what you currently do and if you can make that connection, it's stepping on the gas as far as your commitment, your willingness to see things through, etc. Because now it's very emotional and you're very associated with it. Why you're here, what do you want? What's your definition of success? Right. Those three questions really determine whether anything is risky or not. So for someone like me, whose really bigger question is, I'm not suggesting anyone take on my beliefs, but I think that you don't exist. You're born, you die and then you don't exist. There's no life after death, there's no nothing. You have a limited time on this planet, just my beliefs. And so I want to make the most of my time on this planet, recognizing that I wasn't here for a long time before and I won't be here for a long time after. And so I just have this limited amount of time. And so to me the question isn't is there life after death? Is the question, is there life before death? Are you going to live your life full out until it's over? And for that I want to live my life full. I want to be used up like I've semi retired three times and I hated it all three times. So that's not what's for me. So for me, the biggest risk is really a lack of options, a lack of following whatever interests me in the moment. And so it's not financial. And that's why other people might see me as a big risk taker, even though I don't consider myself a big risk taker because I've never risked the things that matter most to me. I might have risked what mattered to other people, but not to me. So Mark Zuckerberg, the biggest risk is not taking any risk. In a world that is changing really quickly, the only strategy that is guaranteed to fail is not taking risks. So what I would strongly recommend is that you figure out who you are. I don't know if I shared this last thing or not, but I want to share it just to make sure. So Claire Graves, who was a professor at Union College and he developed a model that was above Maslow. So Maslow has the five different things, self actualization on top. There have been a few scholars that have actually continued that model further up. So there are higher levels past Maslow's. And I took one of these tests with all these other levels and I was a level. And this coach of mine who gave me the test, spiral dynamics is what it's called for anyone who's familiar with it. I asked him like, what how do I get to an 8. Even though you're not supposed to want to be better, everyone does. So he said, here's the difference. As a seven, you're spending a lot of time trying to figure out who you really are. As an eight, you recognize that who you are is who you need to be in any given moment. There is no you. Now. I don't think that I'm there. Hopefully one day I get there. But I was listening to a presentation by Werner Erhart, who's one of my, like, heroes as far as, like, thinking goes. And he has a presentation where he starts talking and he goes, somewhere in the presentation, he says he makes a promise. Not a promise. He makes a statement that might be delivered on in the presentation where he says, the you that you think you are is just a superstition. That's it. It's just a superstition. And when you realize that, that a superstition is just a superstition, it loses all its power. And my belief is that my experiences in life have led me to the conclusion to be very comfortable with uncertainty, because maybe, like, my childhood was uncertain. So I'm comfortable in that place. But being comfortable in uncertainty is more important today than it's ever been. And the easiest way to be comfortable in uncertainty is to be confident in yourself. And the easiest way to be confident in yourself is to achieve success based on who you are, not trying to be anyone different than who you are, and embrace what is most unique about you, because that's where your power is, and that's what will give people something to talk about. So thank you.